Recently,
a rather shocking “judicial opinion” was handed down by
a bare majority of the Indiana Supreme Court, to the effect that it
is supposedly illegal under Indiana’s “public policy”
for any individual to resist an unlawful search, seizure, arrest, or
other assault or detention by rogue law-enforcement officers (or, presumably,
any other rogue public officials purporting to enforce, but actually
violating, the law).

Many
people are rightly concerned that this decision will provide more grist
for the mill of the national para-military police state now
being elaborated around the misnamed Department of Homeland Security,
which is stretching its tentacles into every State and Local police
department. No doubt it will—and perhaps was even intended to
do so. For, plainly, this decision is an all-out frontal attack on a
principle well known to the Founding Fathers. As Sir William Blackstone
observed, “[s]elf-defence * * * , as it is justly called the primary
law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by
the law of society”. Commentaries on the Laws of England
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Robert Bell, Subscribers’ Edition,
4 Volumes & Appendix, 1771-1773), Volume 3, at 4.

Protective
measures, though, are available. WE THE PEOPLE are not at the
mercy of the ideological descendants of Reinhardt Heydrich and Lavrenti
Beria who seem to have usurped control over much of America’s
contemporary “judiciary”. For Indiana, as well as every
other State in the Union, has a government of legislative supremacy
subject to popular sovereignty. So, this most recent “judicial”
travesty can be rectified in Indiana, and prevented in other States,
by the simple expedient of a statute.

As
a public service, I have drafted a model bill that, with a bit of workmanlike
tinkering by local lawyers to fit it into the possible peculiarities
of each State’s own code, should do the job (at least as a first
step).

I
am confident that, in many States, foresighted patriots will put this
suggestion to good use.

AN
ACT TO GUARANTEE THE RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENSE TO THE PEOPLE OF [...name
of State...]

SECTION
1. The State of [ ... ] recognizes that the right of personal self-defense
is an unalienable right that no just government, or any official of
any such government, may abridge, infringe, or burden at any time, for
any reason, or to any degree.

SECTION
2. No individual within this State shall be denied, prevented from exercising,
or penalized for having exercised, the right to defend

(a)
his or her person in any place; or

(b)
the person of any member of such individual’s family, or any friend,
associate, or co-worker in any place; or

(c)
the privacy of such individual’s home, permanent or temporary
residence, place of employment, or vehicle; or

(d)
the security of such individual’s property, possessions, papers,
and other effects of whatever nature, wherever they may lawfully be
kept; or

(e)
the privacy of the home, permanent or temporary residence, place of
employment, or vehicle of any member of such individual’s family,
or any friend, associate, or co-worker who has, directly or indirectly,
placed such home, permanent or temporary residence, place of employment,
or vehicle in such individual’s custody or under his or her supervision
or care; or

(f)
the security of the property, possessions, papers, and other effects
of whatever nature, wherever they may lawfully be kept, of any member
of such individual’s family, or any friend, associate, or co-worker
who has, directly or indirectly, placed such property, possessions,
papers, or other effects in such individual’s custody or under
his or her supervision or care,

against
an unlawful search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention,
or unlawful attempted search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention,
by any law-enforcement officer or other public official of this State
or any of its political subdivisions, so long as such individual employs
in his, her, or another’s defense, or in the defense of the privacy
or security of his, her, or another’s home, permanent or temporary
residence, place of employment, vehicle, property, possessions, papers,
or other effects, no force or threat of force greater than he or she
reasonably believes at the time to be necessary under the circumstances
in order effectively to deter, repel, or otherwise resist such unlawful
search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention or unlawful attempted
search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention.

SECTION
3. In any civil action or criminal prosecution in which is at issue
an individual’s exercise of his or her right of self defense with
respect to an actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest, or other
assault or detention by any law-enforcement officer or other public
official of this State or any of its political subdivisions—

(a)
The lawfulness or unlawfulness of such actual or attempted search, seizure,
arrest, or other assault or detention shall be determined before any
other issue is heard and decided.

(b)
The party or parties asserting the lawfulness of the said actual or
attempted search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention shall
have the burden to produce competent evidence thereof beyond a reasonable
doubt.(c) No matter
how any other issues in the action or prosecution may be tried or decided
under applicable law, the issue of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of
the actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or
detention shall be tried to a jury, in which proceeding

(i)
the jury shall consist of twelve persons;

(ii)
the jury shall be instructed that the reasonableness of the force
or threat of force that was employed by the individual in the exercise
of his or her right of self-defense must be determined from the viewpoint
of the individual at the time that he or she so acted; and

(iii)
the jury shall be instructed that it may judge, not only the facts,
but also the law under color of which arose the actual or attempted
search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention; and

(iv)
the jury’s verdict must be unanimous.

SECTION
4. In any civil action, howsoever and by whomsoever initiated, in which
is at issue an individual’s exercise of his or her right of self
defense with respect to an actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest,
or other assault or detention by any law-enforcement officer or other
public official of this State or any of its political subdivisions,
the said individual may cause to be named or joined as adverse parties
any or all of the individuals who counseled, authorized, planned, or
participated in such actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest, or
other assault or detention, for the purpose of adjudicating the lawfulness
thereof. In the ensuing litigation, no defense of or other argument
based upon official immunity, whether absolute, qualified, or of any
other kind or degree whatsoever, shall be allowed.

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And
if the jury determines that such actual or attempted search, seizure,
arrest, or other assault or detention was unlawful, then each and every
individual who counseled, authorized, planned, or participated in such
actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest, or other assault or detention
shall be personally liable, jointly and severally, for all damages suffered
by the individual who exercised his or her right of self-defense, as
well as for all reasonable attorney’s fees, expenses, and other
costs which that individual incurred in litigating the question of the
unlawfulness of the actual or attempted search, seizure, arrest, or
other assault or detention. Provided, that no portion of any
damages, attorney’s fees, expenses, or other costs imposed upon
any individual under this subsection shall be paid by any public treasury,
office, fiscal agent, or other authority of the State or any political
subdivision thereof; nor shall any such public treasury, office, fiscal
agent, or other authority reimburse or make whole any such individual,
either directly or through insurance, guarantee, surety, or any other
third-party payment, for any such damages, attorney’s fees, expenses,
or other costs.

Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four
degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).

For more than thirty years he has
practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme
Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases
leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education,
Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America
v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on
the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors,
may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their
employment.

He has written numerous monographs
and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county.
His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces
of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States
Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American
monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us

He is also the co-author (under
a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER:
A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered crash
of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes. www.crashmaker.com

Many people are rightly
concerned that this decision will provide more grist for the mill of the
national para-military police state now being elaborated around
the misnamed Department of Homeland Security...